What is a good processor or GPU for fast video rendering?

[johnharlin]

I am tired of my slow Pentium 4 1.6 ghz computer taking over 6 hours to convert 4 hour AVI movies to DVD. All video rendering is way too slow. And I'm going to be video editing even more now that I have a digital camera with HD video.

Could anyone recommend what processor or GPU I should get so that I can increase the speed of rendering substantially. My budget is around $300 so obviously I can't get the best that money can buy but I should still be able to get something better than what I have to cut down this slow rending time. I was thinking like one of the AMD Phenom or AMD Athlons because price per performance is a lot better. Also, someone told me that a good GPU will render at least 10 times faster than a processor. Any recommendations on that would be great too.

[MJA]

$300 for a whole system?
for the CPU u need a new motherboard,memory,and a PSU like 500/600 w and up

AMD Athlon II X4 640 $99

G.SKILL 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 $65


GIGABYTE GA-880GMA-UD2H motherborad (video on board) $99

here goes your $300

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128445


wait .you have $35 left.lol .Rosewill RD400-2-DB 400W $34.99(sorry no CORSAIR PS for you )
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182074

[redwudz]

You will likely also have to add in a operating system and some hard drives.

If you are just running a 32bit OS, 4GB RAM will be a bit cheaper, ~$40US. A 32bit OS can't use more than 4GB RAM.

That's a good MB and you don't need a separate GPU as the CPU can do the encoding. I'd like to see a GPU that can encode ten times faster than a CPU (At the same quality). Don't believe everything you hear.

A 500W PS should be plenty. I wouldn't go cheap there as you could loose the MB and everything else if it fails catastrophically.

[mh2360]

You have to take into account which codecs you will be using. GPU acceleration probably wont help you unless you are going to use H.264 and you buy a graphics card with some chest hair. Personally I would concentrate on the CPU, unless you also like gaming.

With my Athlon II x4 640, I do see a huge improvement with MPEG-2 using TMPGenc Xpress or CCE, but I rarely use MPEG-2 these days. x264 benefits the most, with every core maxed out to 100%, a great improvement over my old dual core.

Current versions of XviD and DivX don't seem to make full use of all 4 cores , the same applies to XviD/MPEG-4 using FFmpeg and Mencoder. They are a little faster, but not as fast as one would expect from having the 2 extra cores, quite disappointing really.

As you can see from the screen shot, with FFmpeg/libxvid encoding at the highest settings and using 4 threads, only about 50% of the CPU is being used.